Someone is hunting down thugs in the City of Living Dreams, where any pleasure or drug is available for a price. Though the planet is strictly off-limits to military personnel in training, Lieutenant Junior Grade Palladia Conté is discovered there, and immediately conscripted to help stop the killing spree.

A measure of the depth, first appeared 2008 in Residential Aliens where it’s available for reading.

There we were, contingent 47 of the Engineering Corps, ready to die for our planet, and he had to give in. They wouldn’t have even touched him. By his uniform they knew he wasn’t one of us. They didn’t know civilian support uniforms. If he hadn’t told them they would have never guessed he was a Designer.

The Designer first appeared in Ray Gun Revival, Issue 57, 2010, by Double-edged Publishing. It is a stand-alone story in the Space Opera subgenre.

On space parcel duty, Ensign Palladia Conté, tracks a misdirected package to a radioactive planet that is not where it’s supposed to be, and stumbles upon a forgotten Sirio-Terran mining colony caught in a conspiracy to steal classified Terran technology.

A self-contained prequel to A measure of the depth set 1.5 years earlier, this story gives you more background on Navy officer Palladia Conté of the Civilization Conference Space Force. It is intended as Chapter 1 of the serialized novel Soldiers of Mercy.

1862: Dr. Bernice Vedeen has chartered transport across the Black Sea to carry medical supplies intended for Dr. Livingstone’s mission in Africa. She does not believe in the existence of vampires. But the discovery of the blood-drained corpse of a Russian aristocrat on board is about to bring her face to face with an even deadlier terror.

There is another dimension to the rule “Judge not lest thee be judged” that we need to talk about. Remember back when Jesus was talking about anger? He said that to call someone Raca (empty headed) makes us answerable to the court. But calling anyone a fool puts us in danger of the fire of hell. Why? Why is calling someone a fool, so wrong? Because, as Jesus’ Jewish audience would understand, this is an allusion to Psalm 14:1 (and Psalm 53) The fool says in his heart, there is no God.

We already pointed out that in the middle of the first section of the Sermon on the Mount Jesus says: (Matthew 5:48) Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. And then He starts laying out how God our Father expects us to live in relationship to the people around us. That continues in the section in chapter 7 of Matthew’s gospel we are about to start. But before going forward it is worth recapping where we’ve been because it will help us see a thread that runs throughout this teaching. It is one of those threads that helps make sense of the whole because it reveals an underlying law that connects the various requirements. These requirements are not individual stand-alone commandments, they are interconnected by one truth: My relationship with God and my relationship with my neighbor are inseparably coupled by the concept: Like-for-like.

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It’s all about communication. The thrill of research, discovery, and invention that drives me on, was cultivated in me by every person that taught me something in my life. And therefore it is meaningful, only, if I pass it on. This is why I teach. This is why I write.Read more